Photography by theonlydeadheadinthehameau

Vertical Lines

This week, we try to demonstrate the importance of vertical lines in composition. To begin with, here’s my personal favourite from the selection for this post:

An abacus in the old schoolroom at Montrol-Senard. It wouldn’t be the same shot if the column second from the right wasn’t slightly askew.

A collection of other verticals:

A ruined Roman temple in Jerash, Jordan. Nice of the security guards to provide scale (and be vertical themselves.

Madame’s idea of heaven: bolts of fabric on display in a quilting supply shop in Dubai.

Detail from one of the minarets at the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

These trees are growing out of a ditch just long the road from here.

Now, two photographs of the same scene, one in landscape, the other in portrait. Unsurprisingly, the vertical represented by the tyre-tracks is a much stronger element in the portrait version; this makes sense because it’s the tyre-track that’s the real subject, and the trees in the landscape version are just a distraction:

Now, for the vertical line that doesn’t really work in the original, here is a ‘before and after’ from Chartres Cathedral. The vertical is obviously where the door meets the wall, but in the original the thing (whatever it is) halfway down the left side of the image is a distraction and, more importantly, because it’s an open doorway shot from the inside, the exterior has been blown out.

However, cropped to remove the distraction, as well as some of the dead space at the top (which also helps to preserve the original image constraints), and with a bit of tweaking of the tone curve, I think it’s a far superior image: